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New Wine Shops in New York Put Patrons at Ease

Jonathan Kemp, left, Andrew Carten, Dave Hitchner and Keith Beavers of Alphabet City Wine Company on the Lower East Side.Credit
Tom White for The New York Times

IT’S Friday night at Alphabet City Wine Company on Avenue C, and the juice is flowing. Two customers lounge on well-worn black vinyl chairs in what could pass for a graduate-school living room. Four more stand in front of a makeshift bar. Music streams from vintage KLH speakers, and Keith Beavers, one of the owners, is deep into his spiel.

“Forget about the word ‘super-Tuscan,’ just try the wine,” he tells a couple at a rustic wood table as he pours a 2006 Montaperto from the Tuscan producer Carpineta Fontalpino into their glasses. He’s gesturing now as if he is at the pulpit, emoting to the masses, not just the six customers in his shop.

“The super-Tuscan idea is so misleading,” he said. “Now everybody thinks super-Tuscans are these big huge things, but this is smoky and smooth, with a subtlety and complexity.”

Sold!

Wherever interest in wine is rising, spirited voices in new shops like Mr. Beavers’s are preaching the pleasures of good bottles. Eric Ambel, a musician and record producer who shops regularly at Alphabet City, likened the staff there to the clerks at record stores he frequented in the 1980s. “They have the same knowing enthusiasm of the guys who tracked your penchant for Pacific Northwest garage rock or pre-CBS Telecaster hillbilly music,” he said.

Like those stores of old, these new wine shops sustain self-reliant souls burning to share their passion for wine. In the process they are extending and improving this country’s wine culture. They stimulate discussion, make more good bottles available to more people and, most important, offer by far the most useful resources for increasing the American public’s confidence in its often uneasy relationship with wine: attentive ears and friendly voices.

Americans today are bombarded with opportunities to learn about wine. New books approach the subject from every conceivable angle, culinary schools offer classes at all levels, and the Internet, well, it just won’t shut up. But the most influential voice many people will hear belongs to their local retailer.

Good wine merchants, like smart sommeliers, are part psychologist and part clairvoyant. They must listen carefully to translate the often inchoate desires of their customers into fulfilling wine experiences. Mr. Beavers puts it slightly differently.

“I’m just a wacko,” he said. “I love getting questions from customers, and I just try to bring wine down to a human level.”

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Ernesto Vega at his store, Table Wine, in Jackson Heights, Queens.Credit
Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times

The recent vintage of shops can be found in pockets of wine enthusiasm around the country, including DomaineLA in Los Angeles, Terroir Natural Wine Merchant in San Francisco and CoolVines in Princeton, N.J. But enthusiasm seems to burn hottest in New York City.

Some merchants, like Mr. Beavers, are bringing their messages to neighborhoods that have never enjoyed the benefits of a good shop. Brooklyn’s small fleet of boutique wine shops has grown in the last few years to include Dandelion Wine in Greenpoint, Thirst Wine Merchants in Fort Greene, T. B. Ackerson Wine Merchants in Ditmas Park and Juice Box Wine and Spirits in Windsor Terrace. In Dumbo, Blanc & Rouge opened in 2000, but in the last few years, under new ownership, it has significantly increased its selection and Web presence.

In Queens, Table Wine recently came to Jackson Heights while Long Island City has gained Vine Wine and Hunter’s Point Wines. And in Manhattan, by no means under-served by great wine shops, the armada has grown not only to include pioneering outposts like Frankly Wines in the triangle below Chambers Street, September Wines on the Lower East Side and Pasanella & Son near South Street Seaport, but shops devoted to single specialties, like Chilean wines at Puro on Grand Street, Spanish wines at Tinto Fino in the East Village, Italian wines at Enoteca Di Palo in Little Italy and California wines at California Wine Merchants in the financial district.

The proprietors of these shops believe it’s crucial to alleviate the anxiety of selecting a bottle. Lily Peachin, who opened Dandelion Wine in Greenpoint almost two years ago, called upon her years working as a bartender to help avoid the sterile atmosphere she finds in too many shops. At Dandelion, she went after a lived-in look, adding art and antiques, and placing a few barstools on the worn, crooked floor.

“I wanted to be kind of a non-wine shop wine shop,” she said. “There’s soul here. You can tell good times have been had in the shop. You get that in restaurants and bars, but a lot of wine stores lack that.”

It is important for her that her customers feel relaxed as they browse. As a bartender, she knew her customers’ names and what they drank, and the value of the buyback in inspiring loyalty. She hopes to create the same relationship with her customers at Dandelion.

Of course, décor rarely matters to the committed or even the novice wine drinker if the wines are not inspiring. Ms. Peachin offers some excellent selections at a price range she tries to keep low in deference to her neighborhood. She has terrific lambruscos from Lini and good California gamays from Edmunds St. John, and for the adventurous, Cheville de Fer from Les Vins Conté, a fine, funky côt, or malbec, from the Loire Valley.

Like almost all these shops, Dandelion emphasizes small producers rather than big brand names. It’s a little less mainstream than Table Wine in Jackson Heights, where the guiding principle is simple: every meal can be enhanced by a bottle of wine. And Dandelion is not so esoteric as Thirst Wine in Fort Greene, which sells only bottles that fit the philosophy of what it calls “slow wines,” made as naturally as possible.

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Alphabet City Wine Company adds to the conversation in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.Credit
Tom White for The New York Times

None of these shops would dream of selling, say, Yellow Tail, the Australian mega-brand that has come to represent the sort of soulless mass-production bottles that people who care about wine are unlikely to find interesting.

“Our store is based on old-school human dialogue and developing trust,” said Jonathan Walton, who works at Thirst in Fort Greene. “If someone asks for Yellow Tail, we’re not judgmental about it. We ask which one they’re looking for and offer a few other options.”

Those options might include a few small French producers in the Rhone Valley or Languedoc. Michael Yarmark and Emilia Valencia, the couple who own Thirst, were inspired by Kermit Lynch Wine Merchant, the retail shop in Berkeley, Calif. The owner, Kermit Lynch, is the pioneering importer who specializes in small, independent French producers, and Thirst carries many of Mr. Lynch’s selections.

Like the record stores of yore, most of these shops treasure their independence, both in terms of tastes and in their distance from the large mass-market distributors. Almost all, for example, refuse to post shelf-talkers, those little marketing aides supplied by distributors that include a score and a blurb from some nationally known critic. Instead, they write their own. They are fiercely partial to their own taste while recognizing the realities of a difficult economy and the spectrum of public tastes. And, all things being equal, their sympathy for the underdog is palpable.

“I like to buy wine from people who actually grow the fruit and make and bottle the wine,” said Paul Huston, an owner of Hunter’s Point Wines and Spirits in Long Island City. “Over 90 percent of the stuff in here is actually grown by the people whose name is on the label.”

Mr. Huston, a restaurant veteran whose résumé as wine director includes Scalini Fedeli and the not-to-be-forgotten Arcadia, opened his shop in late 2006. While he recognizes that the public craves cheap wines, he has been unwilling to curtail a more ambitious vision. His front room is tightly packed with excellent inexpensive selections, but in the expansive rear of the shop he sells far more, including older vintages from France, California and Italy.

“Right now the lower end is crucial,” he said. “But if they don’t see that we really know what we’re talking about, that we offer a depth of vintages and a wild selection of spirits, then we can’t compete.”

Christy Frank, who opened Frankly Wines just over two years ago on West Broadway in Manhattan, was more interested in coexistence than competition. Just a few blocks away are well-established shops, including Tribeca Wine Merchants and one of the city’s leading stores, Chambers Street Wines.

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Joel Hough and his best friend, Chamo, at Thirst Wine Merchants in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.Credit
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

Ms. Frank, who left her job with a wine distributor to spend more time with her husband and children, had visited hundreds of shops and had a precise image of how to fill her 320 square feet.

“I wanted a generalist shop, crammed with everything you might find in a good textbook on wine,” she said. She does not try to outdo Chambers Street in areas in which it excels, like Beaujolais and the Loire. But, textbook in mind, she offers excellent educational packages, like a case of wines that illustrate the different meanings of the term “dry.”

“We listen and ask questions, like, ‘Do you mean creamy, buttery dry or grapefruit dry,’ ” she said. “We take the time to help them understand what they really want so they can ask more definitively.”

Small shops like Ms. Frank’s are built on customer service, with the aim of encouraging return visits and, ultimately, building a cherished corps of regulars. This requires not just tolerance but an eagerness to discuss any aspect of wine, approached from any angle.

“I don’t consider any question stupid,” said Mr. Beavers of Alphabet City. “The anxiety of walking into a wine shop is uncalled for.”

Wine is, after all, about the pleasure it offers. Sometimes, it’s in the glass you’ve poured for yourself, but as any host will tell you, more often it’s what you have poured for your guests.

“What I find most fulfilling is not the big dollar sale but watching the incremental jumps that customers make as they elevate their interest,” said Mr. Huston of Hunter’s Point. “Sometimes you can make a small difference in somebody’s evening with the right bottle. I have no loftier ambition.”

At Dandelion Wine in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, the shop owner Lily Peachin, left, is all ears for her customer, Tom Solomon of Lisbon. The shop emphasizes small wine producers.Credit
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times